I maintain a number of different servers, and work on a number of different projects. I'd like to put all of these things under some sort of version control. I chose Subversion as it has a good command line environment, has much access flexibility, and will work with Windows and Linux based files. I also wanted to secure the respository on a remote computer. At some time in the future, I may allow limited public access to portions of the repository. For now, I want to restrict access via ssh only. Also, at some later time, I may experiment with WebDav and such (which, if I read this stuff correctly, provides Subversion repository access through Windows Explorer). Continue reading "Setting Up and Working With a Remote Subversion..." »
Tuesday, May 29. 2007
Cricket: Combining Three Graphs Into One
In 2007/05/29's Cricket-User mailing list, there was a useful configuration file snippet for charting and summing selected sources: Continue reading "Cricket: Combining Three Graphs Into One" »
Monday, May 28. 2007
Opportunities for High Frequency Traders
Here is an article entitled Opportunities for High Frequency Traders: Intraday Patterns in Price Volatility and Liquidity of SFE Contracts by Professor Alex Frino and Grant Wearin of the University of Sydney, Australia in association with the Sydney Futures Exchange.
I've recently put together some scanning software to look for symbols with high daily volatility. This easy to read paper, confirms what I've found out about daily patterns of volatility. In addition, it adds to my knowledge regarding bid/ask spreads in relationship to depth analysis. The paper also discusses the Predictability of Price Movements of SFE Contracts in relationship to the time of day where it might be easier to predict. Continue reading "Opportunities for High Frequency Traders" »
Sunday, May 27. 2007
Trading Site of the Day -- Peter Hoadley's Option Pricing Models and the "Greeks"
Many discussions regarding volatility and options tend to lean towards non-tradable academic talk. Peter Hoadley's page on Option Pricing Models and the "Greeks" has more tradable bent to it. The article starts off by discussing the basic options formula. Further into the article, he discusses how the formula can be used to further trading strategies.
Saturday, May 26. 2007
SSH Server to Server Connections
I wrote an earlier article on how to make it easy to connect to Linux servers with ssh and to copy files. Continue reading "SSH Server to Server Connections" »
Friday, May 25. 2007
Phishers can use social Web sites as bait to net victims: Informatics study Indiana University (05/24/07)
Personally, I've been able to identify phishing emails as they arrive, and promptly delete them. Indeed, some are quite tempting and realistic, but if one looks at the links closely, the imposters can be separated from the real thing.
If there is ever any confusion, I'll go the source directly, bypassing the link, and type in the correct link directly.
An ACM Newsletter speaks of a study that show that separating the wheat from the chaffe is becoming more difficult. Here is what they say:
Popular social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace are being used by cybercriminals to gather personal information to create targeted phishing attacks, according to Indiana University School of Informatics researchers. In their study, "Social Phishing," the researchers established a baseline for the success rate of traditional and social network-based phishing attacks. Phishers steal personal information by sending authentic looking requests, either by email or instant messaging, asking someone to click on a link and submit their information on what looks like a legitimate Web site. "Phishing has become such a prevalent problem because of its huge profit margins, ease in launching an attack, and the difficulty of identifying and prosecuting those who do it," says associate professor of informatics and computer science Filippo Menczer. "Our study clearly shows that social networks can provide phishers with a wealth of information about unsuspecting victims." The study sent email messages to two groups of students asking them to enter their university ID and password. One group received an email from what they thought was a friend, while the other group received an email from a stranger. Only 16 percent of students who received an email from a stranger entered their information, while 72 percent of those receiving emails from "friends" gave away their information. Associate professor of informatics and member of the research team Markus Jakobsson says they were astonished by the 72 percent response rate. The researchers suggested some countermeasures to prevent phishing, including digital signatures on emails to verify the source, browser toolbars that alert users to spoofing attempts, spam filters that detect spoofed emails, and providing users with a secure path to enter passwords, alerting users that they are trying to authenticate to an unknown site. The study is scheduled to be published in the October 2007 issue of Communications of the ACM.
The full article can be found at the Indiana University.
Color Name Enumeration for C++
I was looking to use named colors in Microsoft's Visual Studio C++, but couldn't find any enumerations anywhere. I found a Wiki Entry which listed Web Colors, aka X1 Color Names. In taking a look at the source code for the web page, I noticed that the tables were produced in a nice, computer readable format. Continue reading "Color Name Enumeration for C++" »
Sunday, May 20. 2007
SSH Article Summary
Here are a few articles I've written regarding SSH: Continue reading "SSH Article Summary" »
Friday, May 18. 2007
Using a USRobotics Modem for Out of Band Management (OOB)
In configuring an older 33.6Kbps US Robotics modem for accepting auto-dial-up calls into a router, here are a few items to know:
- Use 'at&f1&b1&w0&w1y0' to force the modem to speak at 9600 to the router
- use 'ati5' to confirm new communications rate setting
- I seem to recall that all dip switch settings are in the up position but for 2, 4, 8, which are down
Thursday, May 17. 2007
HTML Page Template Framework
'Glue' web pages on the monitoring server are generated through the Mason Delivery Engine. In other words, Mason is a Perl based template system used for formatting the primary web pages of this server. It requres the use of Apache and mod_perl. Here is what I do to install Mason for my needs. As the monitoring server relies on tables from two databases, OneUnified and NetDisco, the installation process revolves around getting things ready for these two types of databases. Continue reading "HTML Page Template Framework" »
Debian based Open Source Network Monitoring Server
In giving back to the wealth of tools the open source community has provided, I have created a number of pages describing how I have assembled a set of open source based network monitoring tools. Continue reading "Debian based Open Source Network Monitoring Server" »
Wednesday, May 16. 2007
One Unified Address Management Schema v1.1
I did some more brainstorming on how I wanted to visually represent a network along with it's address structure. I've incorporated some additional tables into the design to handle a hierarchical network map. Continue reading "One Unified Address Management Schema v1.1" »
Tuesday, May 15. 2007
One Unified Address Management (OUAM)
For the longest time, I thought that the sum total of the ip address management solutions out there revolved around NorthStar and IPplan, neither of which really were as robust as I'd like. Continue reading "One Unified Address Management (OUAM)" »
Import IANAifType
From the web page http://www.iana.org/assignments/ianaiftype-mib there is an list of interface types. Early portions of this list are incorporated into /usr/share/cricket/util/genDevConfig. The full list is parsed and imported into the database.
Continue reading "Import IANAifType" »Monday, May 14. 2007
Nagios Installation and Sample Configuration
Introduction
As part of the network monitoring server, Nagios is used for monitoring servers and their services. Continue reading "Nagios Installation and Sample Configuration" »